1 COMMENT

They do if there is no independent oversight, just as businesses do. In Venezuela, there is no independent oversight (administrative, judicial, etc.). The mafias that finance ’em collude with the mafias that build ’em. And if there’s a problem, it gets settled in the street.

What a shame, such a great uniquely tasting Venezuelan product. Seems to me that this is a renewed attack on the Polar group as a whole. One thing is for sure: if there is no more or a shortage of beer, Chavismo is history!

People say Venezuelans are hard workers. Thats BS. A few venezuelans are hard workers, most are riddled with sloth. Since they cant be booted and they get fuully paid because they have “rights” they do whatever the fuck they want. It sucks.

Chavistas seem to have fallen into the opposite trap of Libertarians. Libertarians believe that businesses when unfettered by government regulation will offer the lowest prices and best products in a responsible manner. In reality, some regulation is necessary for numerous reasons.

Chavistas lie on the opposite end of the spectrum, believing that businesses are the root of all evil but individual workers will be free from avarice or the selfish motivations which drive businesses to monopolize markets and damage the environment. Efe clearly shows workers will do exactly the same thing Chavistas accuse businesses of if they can get away with it.

Am all in to scream for my rights as a worker but this is well beyond commie madness. Unions should not be stopping the production of any company on a whim, because the productions is what pays the salary, and I’d rather not to have any union at all than provoking the downturn of the company where I work.

You are right- unions operate on a democratic, majoritarian principle, in accordance with their constitutions. So if your union leaders are making bad decisions, you have only yourself and your fellow workers to blame. As I see it, however, the problem with trade unions in Venezuela, particularly in the construction industry, is that corruption and lack of oversight has displaced democratic, majoritarian principles. Legal mechanisms in place to safeguard those principles are not enforced and are manipulated for political ends, independent unions and their collective agreements are not recognized by labour tribunals, and the overall result is poor internal governance, non-compliance with constitutions and collective agreements, unnecessary work stoppages, and violence. Sound familiar?

A minority union there elected to strike and brought the company down with it. No more Twinkies…which for gringos is the same as no Harina PAN.

In theory, a union and the management should mutually offset each other with the government acting as an unbiased arbiter of the outcomes. This doesn’t work when not only are the union and the government ideologically aligned, but more or less allied thereby negating an unbiased opinion.

Stacked decks are perfectly acceptable if it favors the unions, but when the business calls it a day and closes the doors because it is no longer in their interest to maintain an ongoing enterprise everyone loses.

And of course, yoyo, there’s no connection whatsoever between the company being able to make a profit and the workers getting paid.

So far as unions being unable to call a strike if the workers don’t want to strike, ho ho ho. That may be true in countries where ‘union leaders’ don’t carry guns and settle differences with bullets. And where union heavies don’t show up at the homes of workers who don’t want to strike and threaten them with ‘consequences’. And where unrepresentative cliques, with the backing of the inspectoria de trabajo and the labour ministry, don’t hijack unions for their own purposes, extorting money out of companies in exchange for not halting production.

If that’s really what you believe, you obviously don’t have much idea how government-backed unions work in Venezuela (especially in the construction industry, btw).

If you were at work, doing your job, and a fellow worker pulled a knife on you to convince you to vote a certain way, and the incident were captured on video, with full audio, in living color, with all faces easily indentifiable, and the Ministerio de Trabajo dictated to the company that it could not fire the knife wielding worker, how would you feel?

The Coppelia was Castro’s version of “bread and circuses”. In 1997, if you stood in line for about 90 minutes, you could get a dish of pretty good ice cream. I have heard that the quality has gone down since then.

My brother visited Havana in the late 70’s. I remember his remarks on the very long line-ups for an ice cream. Just a simple thing like that speaks volumes over the efficiencies in the factors of Cuban production. No improvement in 20 years. Gracias por todo, Fidel.